Awards
Winner of the 1981 National Book Award
Synopses & Reviews
Woven from memory, myth, and fact — a journey into the hearts and minds of Chinese men in America: the grandfather who slaved in the Sierra Nevadas on the transcontinental railroad?the father who danced down Fifth Avenue, like Fred Astaire, on days off from the laundry?and the son who returned to China to find release from his dead mother's angry spirit. Here is an accomplished storyteller's remarkably beautiful tale of what they endured in a strange new land.
Review:
"A history at once savage and beautiful, a combination of bone-grinding reality and luminous fantasy." New Republic
Review:
"Superb...humorous...magical. We are in the presence of a splendid raconteur, who shares with us the myths and stories that emerge from the lode of a culture's deepest realities." Chicago Tribune
Review:
"China Men is a voyage itself, to China and back. It will come to be regarded as one of the classic American works on the experience of immigration...a work of enormous power, feeling and understanding." Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Synopsis:
The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here's a storyteller's tale of what they endured in a strange new land.
About the Author
Maxine Hong Kingston is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who operated a gambling house in the 1940s, when Maxine was born, and then a laundry where Kingston and her brothers and sisters toiled long hours. Kingston graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1962 from the University of California at Berkeley, and, in the same year, married actor Earll Kingston, whom she had met in an English course. The couple has one son, Joseph, who was born in 1963. They were active in antiwar activities in Berkeley, but in 1967 the Kingstons headed for Japan to escape the increasing violence and drugs of the antiwar movement. They settled instead in Hawai‘i, where Kingston took various teaching posts. They returned to California seventeen years later, and Kingston resumed teaching writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
While in Hawai‘i, Kingston wrote her first two books. The Woman Warrior, her first book, was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award, making her a literary celebrity at age thirty-six. Her second book, China Men, earned the National Book Award. Still today, both books are widely taught in literature and other classes. Kingston has earned additional awards, including the PEN West Award for Fiction for Tripmaster Monkey, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the National Humanities Medal, which was conferred by President Clinton, as well as the title “Living Treasure of Hawai‘i” bestowed by a Honolulu Buddhist church. Her most recent books include a collection of essays, Hawai‘i One Summer, and latest novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. Kingston is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.
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